MariaDB is a derivative from the world-famous enterprise class MySQL database. The MySQL founder is Michael Widenius, also known as Monty. He created the project, it worked out for some time, it caught Sun’s attention and they bought it. Then Oracle bought Sun and knowing Larry everyone left running without looking what was left behind. […]
How to install MariaDB in FreeBSD
How to install the bash shell on FreeBSD
Believe it or not the Bash shell does not come installed on the system. By default FreeBSD uses the sh shell (after the rewrite under the BSD license on 1989 of the original Bourne Shell found on UNIX, which had inherited the ‘sh’ name from the original’s Thomson shell), the C shell or the tcsh […]
The LAMP stack (Debian 9)
LAMP stack stands for a software stack composed by Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Perl). It is used for many purposes and its common ground for system administrators. Since there are several of Linux distributions there are some differences in the way the LAMP stack is installed. In this guide we are using the […]
How to secure FreeBSD (server minimal edition)
This is a very simple and easy to follow guide on securely administer your FreeBSD server. That said I am not a security expert although I’ve gained some knowledge as time goes by. Not pretending to be the definitive guide this article is an introduction on how to secure FreeBSD in which I will tackle […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s laptop with Ubuntu
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]
A brief introduction to Regular Expressions
A regular expression is a set of characters, a string of characters if you will, that specify a pattern. Ever used the grep command? It makes use of them. The ‘grep’ command is very handful when one needs to look for certain things inside a text file, or looking for some specific pattern from another […]
What is Expect?
Expect is a handy scripting tool for task automation. You may have never heard of it. I heard about many scripting things before. But one day I needed something simple but didn’t know how to proceed, what would be a good tool for my purpose. The task was simple. Exporting a website content from a […]
How to configure the PF firewall on FreeBSD
There are three firewall options on FreeBSD. The in-house built IPFW, the ‘old’ IPF (known as IP Filter) and PF ported from OpenBSD. PF is a very popular piece of software which was originally sparked from an issue on the IPF license that prevented making changes publicly available, which the OpenBSD did all the time. […]
VMWare ESXi (One)
The VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor developed by the VMWare company and it is widely known and used in many environments and enterprises of all sorts. Nowadays it is the main component of a sort of a software suite. It is a type one hypervisor which means it runs directly on to the hardware controlling […]
How to install sudo in FreeBSD
Sudo is a very useful application. It allows a regular user to perform tasks only reserved to the root account. There is lots of documentation about sudo and there is even a book about it called “Sudo Mastery”. If you need to investigate deep on this, buy it. Why do you need this? Well… Everyone […]